Building virtual towns and other urban establishments has long been one of mankind's best selling games, weather through kids constructing houses with Lego bricks, Monopoly or Tetris, or through adult games such as SimCity, CityVille, FarmVille and alike. Building urban establishment prevails today in social gaming, the most widely played genre on the internet and mobile.
A virtual world is an online community (i.e. multiple users) that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. Via a computer, the user accesses a computer-simulated world that presents perceptual stimuli to the user, who in turn can manipulate elements of the modeled world and thus experience a degree of presence. Such modeled worlds and their rules may draw from the reality or fantasy worlds. Example rules are gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, and communication. Communication between users can range from text, graphical icons, visual gesture, sound, and rarely, forms using touch, voice command, and balance senses. Players create a character that travels between buildings, towns, and worlds to carry out business or leisure activities. According to K Zero, a virtual world consultancy service, there were over 1 billion (1,009,000,000) people worldwide registered in virtual worlds. Most accepted definitions of virtual worlds require that it be persistent; in other words, the world must continue to exist even after a user exits the world, and user-made changes to the world should be preserved.
All over the world, cross cultures and lifestyles, people seem to get addicted to mindless playing activities that exhaust free time. These may include playing Solitaire, taking care of a Tamagotchi, building a neighborhood in CityVille, talking to Talking Tom the Cat, playing Tetris, taking care of a Webkinz virtual creature, and so forth.
Crowdsourcing is, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, this process can occur both online and offline. It combines the efforts of crowds of self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each one on their own initiative adds a small portion that combines into a greater result. Crowdsourcing is different from an ordinary outsourcing since it is a task or problem that is outsourced to an undefined public rather than to a specific, named group.